


Candy

by lvckyphan



Series: The Helios Universe [2]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Art, Broken Love, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gay, Language, M/M, Mental Illness, Nihilistic Mess, Phan Angst, Phan Fluff, Psychology, References to Shakespeare, Sadness, Sequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-01 11:45:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16284017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lvckyphan/pseuds/lvckyphan
Summary: PART TWO“I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.” — William Shakespeare.An addict. A husband. A dead sunflower and William Shakespeare.





	1. Chalk

**Author's Note:**

> This is the official **Teeth** sequel, or the second instalment in **The Helios Universe**. You will need to read the first part before this, as the tale is confusing at the best of times. You can find it on my profile.
> 
> Despite not being in this particular fandom or even involved in the boys at all anymore, I felt as though it was necessary I came back to this. The first thing you should know before reading on is that I write because it’s both a passion and a therapy, not because I want to please people. From an author’s perspective, the characters deserved this, as did the fans of the previous work.
> 
> No other project of mine has challenged me to the extent that this already has, and I know will continue to. I am so excited to see the direction it takes and to reveal things you never could have imagined. I hope you enjoy your stay.

****

**THE HELIOS UNIVERSE:**

****

**PART TWO**

**number one: chalk**

 _They_ say William Shakespeare probably didn’t exist. And they say Phil Lester probably wishes he didn’t either, probably wishes his parents had been more careful when attempting to jot down their fling under the crossed-out subheading of _romance._ All the torn pages and all the spilled ink, staining the white-rose-purity of a love that didn’t make sense because neither had attempted to play by definition. Neither had wanted to, Phil knows, and he blames the pair of them like the soldier blames the war, like the greatest writer of all time blames the paper he wrote upon because the being cannot exist without there being something to begin with.

Phil Lester was twenty-two when he met the man he’d come to refer to as _husband_ , the man who’d rip him to shreds like a piece of writing you’ll only ever remember as an attempt because it wasn’t good enough and it couldn’t even pretend to be. And Phil doesn’t understand why he wishes he’d done everything differently but, given the chance to try again, knows he wouldn’t change a thing because sometimes life isn’t about the bad decisions any more than it is about what they teach us. Sometimes life isn’t about the passing any more than it is about the resuscitation and maybe it would be better not to pass at all, or something, but how can you return if you never fucking leave?

Phil doesn’t know.

Phil doesn’t care.

Somewhere in the city of Paris, the ring he gifted Dan Howell swims in a murky puddle on a step outside of a café, dirty and cold and made up of the same rusting metal that had caught the light of the afternoon sunshine when they’d married beneath a canopy of flowers. Pink and blue, yellow and green for the leaves and the stalks and that woman’s dress he doesn’t care to name. 

He can smell the shade of it like cigarette smoke in his nostrils.

Stagnant water.

Rotting flesh.

Blood in a pool on an old beige carpet.

His husband’s almond eyes, reciting _in sickness_ and reciting _in health_ and confessing, “I could never love anyone the way I love you,” in a voice that drips sick with his grandmother’s golden syrup.

Phil is thirteen and standing before his parents on a stage that creaks like a broken door, in the middle of his high school’s theatre. It’s Shakespeare’s ‘ _As You Like It_ ’, as strung up on the bulletin board on the wall in the general cafeteria and the first time his father has seen him perform. There’s a black hat on his head and a book clutched under his arm, and he’s pacing in the forest before Duke Senior.

(He must remember his lines, God knows he knows it’s coming. Monologue from the top, down to the end, right back over again. He’s shaking in his little black boots and he can’t remember what to say.)

“‘ _Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy_ ,’” The character of Duke Senior recites. “‘ _This wide and universal theatre presents more woeful pageants than the scene wherein we play in_.’”

Monologue from the top.

An audience that pays attention.

God knows they know what’s coming.

Phil—(the old ‘Melancholy Jaques’)— clears his throat and begins, “‘ _All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts_ —‘”

His father is staring at him from the front row. Eyebrows knitted, frown tight, gaze hard and—

Something about acts.

Something about newborns.

“‘ _All the world’s a stage_ ,’” he says again.

Phil wishes he still knew what that meant.

He’s standing in the rain and wishing he still knew what that meant, present-day and thirty-something as the sky crackles and crumbles above. Louis is before him with his trainers on the curb of the sidewalk and one arm shielding his face from the downpour, the other waving ahead for a reason it appears Phil has forgotten.

“Louis,” he manages. He doesn’t recognise the sound of his own voice. It’s been so long, he thinks, and everyone has forgotten where they were. “What are you doing? Louis, what are you doing?”

“Would you quit asking me the same question?” Louis snaps over the sound of the rain. “I’ve answered you, Phil, I’ve told you, you just have to listen to me and—”

“He’s trying to catch a ride, Phil. We need to hitchhike back to the hotel.”

Phil turns to the voice, and finds Hélène standing at his side with soaking curls and smudged eyeliner. She’s different than what she once was, in character and expression and there’s rainwater on her face but she doesn’t seem to mind. It might as well have been a thousand years, for Phil misses Dan like it’s been a thousand and more and he knows he must be missing this girl like it’s been around the same.

She’s different, but she’s beautiful.

Always beautiful.

“We need to find Dan, Hélène,” Phil tells her. He shivers in his grey shirt and thinks about alcohol. “Dan, my Dan—Do you know where he is? Where did he go?”

“He left, love,” Hélène says. The rain is too loud. The street is too empty. “He wanted to go, remember? He wanted to go but he promised to return.”

How can you return if you never fucking leave?

Phil doesn’t know.

Phil doesn’t care.

They say William Shakespeare probably didn’t exist, and they say Phil should have separated from his husband before he gave himself the opportunity to ruin him but perhaps nobody ever does what they’re told and perhaps that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Perhaps the world makes just as much as sense as it’s supposed to, and perhaps this situation does too.

A lover without his lover.

Louis without his smile.

Phil says, “How long has it been?” and realises he’s already making no sense. He remembers that he doesn’t write anymore—at least, not if he can help it—and he remembers that he doesn’t because all it ever made him was a cynic out of his mind. 

But if he still wrote, he thinks, he’d write:

_Welcome home._

And he’d write: 

_We missed you. This is my side of the story._

“Louis, we’d be better off walking—” Hélène remarks. It’s raining in France and Dan is nowhere to be seen. “We could have been back at the hotel already if you’d just listened to—”

“For the last time, Hélène, we’re not _walking_!” Louis yells, and the sky flashes with a bolt of lightning. The horizon is a canvas, swimming with a momentary glimpse of white before returning to its melancholic grey.

“Stop it, Louis,” Phil spits, and he recognises himself in that way he wishes he didn’t. In his father, in his father’s father, in the raging alcoholic that stamps his foot and throws his toys and pissing him off is like taking candy from a baby, Dan used to say.

“You’re patronising me,” Phil would say back.

And then they’d scream and then they’d fight and then neither of them would feel anything because it’s so much fucking easier feeling nothing at all. Fists and drywall and plaster and paint, Dan’s words on Dan’s tongue and Van Gogh lingering there like motherfucking lead poisoning.

It’s all he’s ever known, Phil thinks.

Art is the madman’s antidote.

“Don’t talk to her like that, you piece of shit,” he’s spewing at Louis. “Don’t talk to her like that.”

And God knows he doesn’t mean it but God has never been fucking there and to hell with the possibility of him showing his face now, of him stepping out of the shadows and into the dull cast of light. Right out of the divine city, heels kicking up the dust already settled on the wings of dead angels, sewn together like the stitches up his arms when he slashed them at seventeen. And the scars are still burned into his flesh at thirty-something as though the sting behind the words: _I don’t want to be here anymore_ because they’re the kinds of things that don’t fade, that dawdle in memory from foot-to-foot in the way Phil Lester used to before taking stage in front of the man who called him ‘son’ in the same breath he did ‘useless.’

“Dan’s gone and it’s your fault, Louis, it’s _all_ your fucking fault—”

“ _My_ fault?” Louis seethes. There’s a rage on his face that Phil knows his husband would write down as ‘red.’ Stop signs and fire extinguishers and _shut the fuck up, Dan, just shut the fuck up._ “The only reason he even left was because of you, do you realise that? You ruined him, you broke him—Do you fucking know what you’ve done?”

“Louis,” Hélène says. Her voice is calm over the rush of rainwater but it trembles around the edges like the puddles beneath their shoes. “Come on, don’t do this—We’ll just walk back, yeah? We’ll go and dry off in the room and wait for Dan to get in touch.”

She gave her jacket to Dan, maybe, but Phil doesn’t really remember. He’s shivering in the rain and thinking about Shakespeare as they gather their wits and trudge down the street, trainers muddy and bruised. Their feet squelch in the soles and Phil _knows_ they’re lying when they say old William didn’t exist, but who the fuck would make up such a filthy lie? He sees sinners spitting blood on the first drafts of Genesis and can’t shake the vision from his head, sees the boys in his creative writing class pouring ink on his short stories and screwing them up into balls like _what does it matter if it doesn’t mean anything, you dickhead, what does it matter if nobody will miss it?_

His father is there when his eyelids flutter, cracking his knuckles and dragging the woman he married down the hallway like a fucking rag doll.

Like little Phil and his favourite teddy bear.

Tattered and torn.

Damp with snot and tears.

“We didn’t see the end of the play,” Phil manages, and wonders how long it’s been since he cried.

Louis turns, all shaking shoulders and quivering lips and says, “This is the end, Phil.”

_All the world’s a stage._

: :

Upon returning to the hotel, Louis departs to the bathroom with a crimson face and wild eyes and slams the door on his exit. Hélène flicks at the little kettle provided on a tray atop of the dressing table and curses under her breath, bringing a hand through her dripping hair and muttering, “There’s no water. Of course, there’s no fucking water. I’ll make us some coffee when Louis gets out of there.”

Phil doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

He’s sitting on the end of the bed thinking about Dan and thinking about the rain, and thinking about the way his voice sounded when he spat, “ _Paris is a fucking joke, this is is all a fucking joke_ ,” before the foggy window and its curtains.

He wasn’t wrong.

He wasn’t not right.

They used to call the plays with happy endings comedies, Phil’s mother told him once, and Dan was about as right as that.

“Where has Louis gone, Hélène?”

She’s ringing the water out of her hair and it’s pooling in the form of a damp stain on the carpet.

“The bathroom, love,” she says, not looking at him. Phil doesn’t even know if he’s looking at her. “He probably needs some time.”

“No,” he mumbles, and knows it’s probably best not to. “Where has he _gone_?”

Hélène stalls on the other side of the room. “What do you mean?”

From the window, the moonlight begins to pour through as though the very body itself has collapsed onto the surrounding street. Phil imagines the moons of Uranus—all twenty-seven of them, Titania and Oberon alike—melting beneath the gush of water from the heavens, their chalky white exterior sloshing down drains like spilt milk.

“It doesn’t matter,” he manages. He can taste the vision, thick in his throat. “It doesn’t matter, Hélène, you wouldn’t understand.”

He knows she would, just like he knows Dan would say she would. Just like he knows the words to all the monologues he was never even supposed to, knows the words to all the songs and the periods of blank verse and can speak them drunk or high out of his mind, can speak them with the weight of the world on his shoulders like ‘ _sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything_.’

“I would understand,” Hélène says. She’s standing back by the dressing table. “Tell me. Where has Louis gone? He hasn’t gone.”

“He has gone.”

The sound of the shower scurries in from the bathroom.

“Phil—”

“Where did he go, Hélène?” Phil whispers, and his voice is the shade of the moon on the glass. “He left with Dan, didn’t he? I know he left with Dan. I left with him, too.”

Phil Lester wishes he hadn’t married Dan Howell and he wishes he hadn’t starting writing, either. And he wishes he lived in a world in which they weren’t the same thing, in which the character wasn’t the author and the madman wasn’t the artist.

Hélène stares at him for a moment, before managing a smile as watery as the acrylics on the paintings they tried but couldn’t fucking write and murmuring, “Yeah, love. Yeah, I think he did. I think we all did.”

She isn’t wrong.

She isn’t not right.

They say comedies are just plays with happy endings and God knows we’d all die for one of those, but He also knows we’re not fucking stupid and we fear the final curtain more than we do the audience. 

“‘ _At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face_ ,’” Phil is thirteen again, shaking on the stage before his mother and his father, the Illuminating Wisdom and the Destructive Spirit. “‘ _Creeping like a snail, unwillingly to school_.’”

He remembers the lights and the cameras.

He remembers his classmates dressed as trees.

He remembers the taste of the toffee in the greenroom and he remembers—

“Phil, love,” Hélène is saying. She’s staring at him with a packet in her hand. “Would you like a cookie? It’s been so long since any of us ate anything. You can save it to have with your coffee, if you’d like.”

“I don’t know,” Phil says. His skin prickles under his shirt, soaked through from the rain. “Can we go to a bar, Hélène? Why can’t we go to a bar?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she admits. “And you can’t be drinking on an empty stomach.”

Phil wishes he knew how to tell her that he doesn’t care. He wishes he knew how to tell her that that that’s something nobody really cares about anymore because he’s sick and he’s tired—they’re all sick and they’re all tired—and, at the end of the day, it all burns the same.

“Are you scared of me, Hélène?” he asks, plucks the question out of thin air like his mother picked those headlice off of his scalp. “Please don’t be scared of me, I—You know I didn’t mean it.”

Hélène is shivering as she retrieves another jacket from the back of the chair and remarks, “No, Phil, I’m not scared of you,” before draping it over her shoulders. 

“You know I didn’t mean it,” he repeats himself. She has to know he didn’t mean it, she has to fucking know he didn’t—

“Didn’t mean, what?”

“That man,” Phil doesn’t think he can say it. His hands tremble and the muscles in his face contract and he just motherfucking _knows_ he’s staring back at her like his father did his mother, guilt-stricken and apologetic for the mess he watched his hands make. “What I did to that man.”

Hélène gives him a small smile and he sees the droop of her shoulders, the purple smudged like notebook-ink under her eyes.

“Yeah,” she says, soft. “I know you didn’t mean it, Phil. We all know that. I don’t think you wanted to—”

She halts on the instant when a buzzing interrupts her. It’s her phone, or something, and Phil watches as she pulls it from the back pocket of her jeans and reads, “ _I am sorry, I am sorry, I am never coming home_ ,” under her breath, a few hundred thousand miles away.

Then she does it again, and the shower stops and everything is moving too quickly.

Phil furrows his eyebrows. “What, Hélène? Where are you going?”

“No, it’s—I think it’s Dan,” she says. “We gave him Louis’ phone, this is a message from Louis. Why did he send this? What the hell is he doing?”

It all burns the same, Phil thinks.

He’s aching for a drink—something strong and something stiff—and he’s aching for his husband at the mention of his name, for his touch and his scent and his fucking space pyjamas. He’s aching for a fix of the shit he hasn’t had in years, of poetry and Manchester and being so in love with someone that you’d let them take everything because—

“Louis!”

Hélène’s knuckles are rapping against the wood of the bathroom door in short, brief knocks and Phil is still sitting in rain-soaked clothes, perched on the end of the bed and thinking about the man at the old hotel.

Kisses and bloodshed.

The devil went to heaven.

“Hélène, I’m just trying to—” The door opens and Louis is standing there in a towel with clothes in his arms, appearing calmer than he once was but flushed nevertheless. He recognises something off about her manner and Phil catches it from a distance away, catches the shift in his eyes from exhausted to concerned. “What is it? What happened?”

“Dan sent me this,” Hélène says, and holds the phone under the boy’s nose. More of a boy than a man, more of a friend then an enemy. More of an orange than a red. “I don’t know what it means, but I—”

“Fuck,” Louis curses, and brings his hands over his clean head of hair. “What the hell is he doing? Hélène, we—God, we can’t just sit around here doing nothing. He’s in trouble, he’s—”

“We don’t know that. We don’t know that at all. Maybe he’s just . . . Maybe he’s—”

“No, we have to go and look for him,” Louis says. “Fuck this, we can’t just stay here in a warm hotel when he’s out there doing God knows what. He can’t find his way back, and you damn well know he can’t.”

Louis is moving around the room at too quick of a pace for Phil to keep up. He doesn’t know what he’s doing or where he’s going or why he wants to go there, but he can feel the organ moving on the left side of his chest and he wants to fucking remove it. It’s twitching and throbbing, thudding and thumping and—

“Well, what if he doesn’t want to come back?” Hélène is saying. “Louis, what if he doesn’t want to? Come on, we can’t go out searching the streets for him. He could be anywhere, let’s just—”

“I can’t just sit here, Hélène!” Louis snaps, tearing through a backpack. Phil notices something yellow in the front. “I’ve spent too goddamn long sitting around doing nothing and look where I’ve ended up! Look at this, look around you—Do you think I _wanted_ this?”

The devil went to heaven.

And God knows he doesn’t mean it but God has never been fucking there and to hell with the possibility of him showing his face now, of him stepping out of the shadows and into the dull cast of light.

The moon pours through the window and Louis starts crying and Hélène whispers, “It’s okay, everything is gonna be okay—Let’s just dry off and eat some cookies, there’s nothing we can do now. We’re all tired and we should go to sleep.”

Phil doesn’t want any fucking cookies.

Dan wouldn’t want any fucking cookies either.

But it’s all they have and all they can afford, so they sit on the carpet with crossed-legs and slouched postures and eat their way through the packet. Phil talks to them about alcohol and talks to them about Shakespeare, and Hélène tells them how she wants to cut her hair but doesn’t know when she should. Everything is just as quiet as it loud, just as violent as it is calm and Phil can’t stop thinking about the scene he left at the old hotel.

He can smell the shade of it like cigarette smoke in his nostrils.

Stagnant water.

Rotting flesh.

Blood in a pool on an old beige carpet.

His husband’s almond eyes, reciting _in sickness_ and reciting _in health_ and confessing, “I could never love anyone the way I love you,” in a voice that drips sick with his grandmother’s golden syrup.

Dan without his ring.

Louis without his smile.

It all burns the same.


	2. Alkali

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **This chapter contains detailed descriptions of drug abuse and mentions of epilepsy. Please take care when reading.**

**number two: alkali**

_Phil_ doesn’t know what time it is when he falls asleep, and doesn’t know what time it is when he wakes up. But behind the window’s rickety glass, the faint shade of melon-orange that has begun to stain the skyline suggests it must be early morning, no later than five or six. There’s a wailing Louis in the back of his mind, a man kneaded delicately to silence beside him by the knuckles of exhaustion and lassitude, a pillow clutched to his chest and another between his knees.

It’s quiet in the hotel room.

Phil stirs in the bed and clambers from it, peering once at the closed bathroom door before wandering over to the empty kettle on the table.

His mother is on the floor stuffing clothes into a suitcase in the burgundy dress she wore to her sister’s wedding—Phil, barely seven, standing at the alter and dancing at the meal with flowers stuffed up the cuffs of his blazer—and she has her back to him, hair falling to pieces from the fixed bun.

“And best man? The _fucking_ best man?” she’s saying. The word is filthy on her tongue, one Phil doesn’t understand in his mother’s delicate accent. “Your father couldn’t tell you the first thing about marriage if your life depended on it, who the hell does he think he is? Who the hell do they think _I_ am?”

“Mom,” Phil manages.

He doesn’t quite know how he does.

He’s thirty odd and his voice is hoarse from the excess liquor, from the years he’s spent chain-smoking and chewing sickly tobacco and he wonders why he’s changed but everything else is the same. He wonders why he isn’t the child he was when his mother first spoke to him like this, why he isn’t the terrified he was when they stormed out of the reception and fled to the hotel and why he knows she isn’t _really_ there but somehow he can still see her.

Somehow, she can still see him.

“Pack your things, Phil,” she tells him. There’s wine on her dress and she’s shaking. “Pack your things, love, come on. We can’t be here when your father gets back.”

Phil is thinking about Dan when they first arrived in Paris, screaming in the bathroom because his own mother wouldn’t leave him alone. Puking in the toilet and all over his space pyjamas, Phil told him she wasn’t there and he meant it like he meant his vows, meant it like he meant every fucking word he uttered in God’s name but things are not as they used to be and so much has ceased to be true.

He rubs his face and mutters, “Stop it, go away—Please, go away.”

His mother is dead behind the eyes when she looks up at him.

And she’s promising that everything will be okay behind them, that she doesn’t need a man and she doesn’t need a drink and she doesn’t need a heaven because a heaven cannot exist without a hell. But she’ll drown her sorrows until she’s nothing but ash anyway, Phil thinks, she’ll drown her sorrows until they can fit her into a casket and ship her off elsewhere and he’ll be away writing the next bestseller when he gets the call that she’s passed and—

“Why aren’t you helping me?” Terror is seeping through the cracks in her tone, like spirits and rainwater and blood down the sewers. “Phil, please—Come on, honey, we can’t afford to waste time.”

She gets up from the floor and he feels her take his hand and she’s a kind-of cold his mother never was, a kind-of cold that gnaws at his bony wrists and trickles into his veins until he feels it in his chest, until it’s there with every pound of his left side like he’s stuck knee-deep in the memory of lunchtimes spent out in the snow. He’s still seven but he’s eight and nine too, ten and eleven and tumbling from sledges, sticking stones and old carrots into the blank faces of snowmen because they’re smiling with their eyes and they’re laughing with them too and the same woman who feels like she never lived a day is standing before the fireplace pouring cocoa into mugs, humming carols she used to sing with her grandparents in church like _bless all the dear children in thy tender care, and take us to heaven to live with thee there._

“Get off,” Phil spits, and he doesn’t know where it comes from. The same place his words for his husband did, maybe, the _fuck you_ ’s and the _hate you_ ’s and the _love you_ ’s. “Get off me, get your fucking hands off me!”

He’s losing his fucking mind and he can’t seem to catch it up. He’s losing it like a marble under his great aunt’s sofa, like his favourite teddy bear (damp with snot and tears) and the one right after that that never did feel the same.

The woman before him is sobbing into her hands, mascara running in streaks of black down her cheeks and pooling around the edges of her face. A bookmark, a note in the margin, a reminder to pick up milk on the way home. She’s crying and shaking her head when she chokes out, “You’re just like _him_ ,” and Phil thinks about all the times his older brother told him to quit, to check himself into a treatment centre and not call him until he was clean, blessed in the name of _and what would she say to you now?_

Suitcases and wine stains.

Cusses and carols.

Phil wants to tell his mother that he loves her, but his father always said the same in the hours after he’d hit her and the hours after he’d told her he wished she was dead, so instead he says, “I’m sorry,” and realises it’s no better.

She’s crying like a baby and he’s as stiff inside as a stillborn’s fist because he feels nothing—can’t fucking feel anything—and things are not as they used to be. There’s a sudden grief behind her black eyes and it all comes flooding back like the wave that took Noah and his Ark, like _you can’t have this_ and _you won’t have that_ and Phil is a child at the end of the emergency room’s corridor, pyjamas rolled up and shoulders shaking.

A phone starts ringing in the hotel room, and it’s only then that he realises he’s crying. Rubbing his hands over his face, he shuffles over to the quaint chair and picks up Hélène’s phone from the arm.

“Hello?”

There’s a rustle and a smoker’s cough.

“Hey, uh,” The voice is female and vaguely familiar. “Is this Hélène?”

“No,” Phil says. His nose is stuffy and he turns to glance at Louis in the bed, taking note of his mother’s disappearance. “What do you want?”

“Wait, wait—Phil?”

He can’t connect the voice to much more than the taste of vodka and the smell of rain, the streetlights in Paris and the grand old theatre.

“What do you want?”

“This is Ally, uh—You probably won’t remember me, I don’t think ‘ya know my name but—” she struggles, suppressing the anxiety gnawing at her words. “—but I have Dan, your Dan, we were together last night and somethin’ happened and I need you and those friends of yours to meet me at the hospital.”

Someone spits in the sink.

Louis rolls over in the bed.

Phil’s stomach lunges and he smells vomit on his breath and he thinks about red lights—thinks about blue—and thinks about gowns that tear down the back. The beat of a drum, the teddy in his arms, the death of grace and the death of eloquence and _a melancholy of mine own._ The first man that touched him, the first woman that kissed him, his unborn child in a hopelessly rounded stomach like Christmas tree baubles and bicycle wheels, icy roads and metal bars. His mouth at his husband’s throat and his hands down his pyjama shirt and _your Dan, your Dan, your Dan._

“Dan?” he manages. “Hospital? What did you do to him?”

“No, he—Listen, ain’t you with your friends? Let me speak to ‘em, come on.”

“Shut up,” Phil seethes, and licks the tears from his lips. “Tell me what you did to him, tell me what you fucking did.”

“Nothin’, I ain’t done nothin’ to him!” Ally squeaks, like a woman out of her depth. “We took K, you hear? We took it and he had a seizure and I called an ambulance and—”

Hélène exits the bathroom and Phil shuts his eyes, shakes his head and thinks _can’t do it, can’t do it, get me the fuck out._ He sees Dan convulsing and choking on his own puke, sees blood spewing out of frost-white lips and purple stains over lids the colour of the strongest alkaline solution, the colour of the most boring chemistry lesson that reeks (to this day) of flesh burning over a blue flame. Safety is orange and danger is red, happiness is yellow and beauty is gold and Phil Lester is the grey of newspaper print and that painting of a fighter-jet on his grandfather’s wall.

“Hey, who are you talking to?” Hélène asks him. Her hands are gentle against his when she attempts to retrieve the phone. “Don’t worry, it’s alright, can you just let me—”

Phil is shaking his head.

“It’s Dan, Hélène, she says it’s Dan and she says—”

Things are not as they used to be and so much has ceased to be true.

“‘ _But it is a melancholy of mine own_ ,’” Phil returns to Jaques, returns to the theatre stage and returns to thirteen. “‘ _Compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in the most humorous sadness_.’”

“‘ _A traveler_ ,’” Rosalind recites. “‘ _By my faith, you have great reason to be sad_.’”

Jaques doesn’t quite believe that.

And Phil doesn’t quite believe it either.

Art is the madman’s antidote, but they say it never was and never fucking could be. They demand less romanticism and demand more authenticity, no glossing or sugarcoating or disregarding fact. So the yellow paint gave Van Gogh lead poisoning and his ear bled and bled, he was a psychotic epileptic and his _work_ was not his _sickness_ like Phil’s flesh is not his page but we are what we create and what we create will never be good enough.

“I know, I know,” Hélène has taken the phone and is talking to Ally. “I know you didn’t, I don’t care about that. Is he gonna be okay? Will you text me the directions?”

Phil glances at Louis in the bed, as he grumbles something under his breath and sits upright.

“Yeah, okay,” Hélène says. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

Louis rubs his eyes and stretches his arms above his head. “Who are you talking to? What’s happened?”

“It’s Dan,” Phil says, and finds himself wishing he didn’t. “They took him to the hospital and we have to go, but I don’t wanna go.”

“What?” Louis’ face changes. “The hospital? What—What has he done? Is he okay?”

Phil can still see the blood on his fists.

He can still see his mother in the burgundy dress and he can still taste the champagne he drank at his wedding reception.

Hélène manages, “Seizure,” and Phil’s brain thuds against his skull like knuckles against the wood of a door, like the sound of bone cracking under his hands and he can’t stop thinking about the woman who raised him and the woman in London who will go on to raise his own.

Baby blue cardigans.

A newborn in its crib.

We are what we create and what we create will never be good enough.

: :

France is warm that morning. Phil doesn’t know why and he doesn’t ask either, but assumes it has something to do with the passing of the previous storm. What remains is but a light drizzle that has already diminished to nothing by the time they start down the street for the hospital, Hélène’s eyes flitting back and forth (up and down and up again) between the directions on her phone and the empty sidewalk. Above the cafés and green-grocers, faded-red canopies hang down and the water droplets drip clean from the edges, falling onto glass table-tops and pooling around nifty chairs.

They pass a small florist’s on the corner of the street and Phil thinks about his husband and his sunflowers, thinks about poppies and thinks about waterlilies and tries to convince himself that he doesn’t miss a thing. In the window, a strawberry-haired woman in a silk-sewn dress is tying a purple ribbon around a bouquet and talking to another on the other side of the desk.

Both women remind Phil of his mother, even though they look very little alike.

“Didn’t she say anything?” Louis’ voice floods the quietude.

Hélène glances at him. “Who?”

“The woman, that girl we saw,” he says. “The one who called about Dan.”

“She said her name was Ally,” Hélène mumbles. “And nothing more than I’ve already told you, no. They did ketamine together and Dan had a seizure and she rang for an ambulance.”

“Ketamine,” Phil mutters, under his breath. His teenage years, white lines and rolled notes and a sedation of the sweetest kind.

“I don’t understand why she thought that was acceptable,” Louis says. “Dan doesn’t appear stable at the best of times and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that _drugs_ are gonna make him worse.”

Hélène ignores the remark, eyes downcast at her phone. “Is he epileptic?”

Spasms and clenched teeth.

Bleeding tongues and smacking lips.

“I don’t know,” Louis admits, and turns around. “Is he, Phil? Epileptic?”

The sky is too orange and Phil can hardly manage it. He kicks a pebble across the road and shakes his head, his stomach grumbling and skin itching for the honeyed burn of liquor. He can’t stop thinking about Dan trothing at the mouth, his mother six feet under and his father sending his fists through the drywall. He can’t stop thinking about his unborn child and William Shakespeare’s dead son, sick at eleven and pleading for mercy.

“It must’ve just been the drugs,” Hélène says. “God knows how much the poor boy took to warrant a reaction like that.”

Phil wasn’t much older than five the first time he came to Paris, all wide-eyed and gangly-limbed. And now, thirty something, he wanders the streets in a stained grey shirt and black jeans with eyes the same vacant and glassy as a coma-induced patient. Everything is monochrome (stripped of colour) and Phil can’t decide if it’s the loneliness or the apathy, the emptiness or the withdrawals or if each and every one is a synonym. He can’t decide if he loves Dan as much as he once said he did, or if all he is and ever will be is a reincarnation of the man who dragged him up, fingers yanking at the scruff of his collar and kicking him into shape.

Dan and his ring.

Ella and their child.

We are what we create and what we create will never be good enough.

Somewhere amongst vacant terraces and damp pavement blocks, Phil finds himself wandering towards a small hospital with a lone ambulance and wheelchair out front. Louis and Hélène walk with a confidence to their step (a confidence the ill man behind them just can’t seem to match) and a determination to their stride that takes them through the broken double-doors, shoes loud against the white marble flooring. In the waiting room, a woman sits with a toddler on her knee and a hand to her temples and the small child watches as Phil lingers behind his friends, gazing at the reception desk’s artificial flowers and small bottle of hand sanitiser. 

“Monsieur, Mademoiselle,” The woman behind the desk greets the pair before Phil in a thick, French accent.

“Uh,” Louis scratches the nape of his neck and clears his throat. “Daniel Howell? Patient?”

Recognition dances an immediate recital in the woman’s eyes and she mumbles, “Oui, oui. Famille?”

Hélène nods her head, and that seems to be enough for the silver-haired woman. With a shift of the paperwork before her, she provides directions to the elevator and informs them of the emergency ward on the second floor. Phil stands watching the toddler wave a stuffed elephant at him and beam from cheek-to-cheek, gurgling and babbling and it’s the easiest he’s felt in months. He sees his own child in the tiny boy, in the black hair and the grey eyes and the woman bobs her knee and holds an arm around his little waist, blue and green striped shirt riding halfway up his stomach and—

“Hi, baby,” Phil says. Louis takes his arm and pulls him along into the elevator but he’s still talking and still smiling. “It was a baby, Louis, did you see the baby? Did you see him, Hélène?”

“Yeah, love,” Hélène says. She’s worn around the edges but a delicate Phil wishes he knew how to describe, the kind-of lovely that doesn’t come around as often as it probably should. She has light makeup on her face and is leaning against the railing in the cramped elevator, hair tumbling down over her eyes and boots still on the dirty floor and Phil manages, “I don’t want to be here no more, Hélène,” and she looks up at him with a dying fire burning in her eyes.

“What do you mean?”

Phil doesn’t want to cry again. “I don’t want to be here no more, I’m tired and—Hélène, I don’t want to.”

“It’s okay,” she says, and reaches out to wrap an arm around his scrawny waist. “It’s gonna be okay, Phil, you just—You have to keep going, alright? I’ll be here.”

He doesn’t want to keep going.

He doesn’t want to want anything.

His head thuds and eyes water and his mother came to see him even though it’s been so long since the church and the burial, the black suit and the runny nose and the framed picture of her grinning with baby teeth beside a candle.

A mother and a daughter.

A wife and a friend.

The woman who calls herself Ally is sat in the corridor, hands hanging down between her knees and she looks like the manifestation of _I don’t think I can do this_ in her grubby shirt and short skirt. She’s sleepy and she’s guilty and Phil can see it like a burst marker all over her face, her conscience as torn as the seam down the side of her skirt.

“Fuckin’ hell,” she remarks, and stands to her feet. “I thought you’d never come, where the hell ‘ya been?”

“We had to walk,” Louis says. “We don’t have the money for a bus or taxi. Where is he? Is he okay?”

Ally runs a hand through her hair and sighs. “Stable, they said. He’s in that room ahead of ‘ya there, I ain’t got a clue when the doctor is gonna get back. He said he took too much and he ain’t happy with his mental state.”

Louis shakes his head. “Nobody’s happy with Dan’s mental state.”

And he’s not wrong.

He’s not not right.

Phil escapes from Hélène’s arm to wander over to the glass window of the room before the group, and puts his hand against it. His palm is cool and eyes still on the man—who looks much more like a boy, a child by size and probably by definition—slumped in the bed in the same fucking space pyjamas. His hair is matted on his head and his mouth open against the pillowcase, skin white and arm trained up to a machine. He’s a scraggly Phil has never seen him, the epitome of misery and forlorn and heartsick.

— _it is a melancholy of mine own._

Phil’s shirt doesn’t feel right and Dan looks cold in the bed.

(But they’re just kids and they’re laying down, and Phil’s holding Dan’s hand and telling him he loves him like he’ll never love anyone else. They’re drinking and they’re smoking, snorting lines off of basins and popping packets of pills and _kiss me, kiss me, kiss me._ They’re walking past nightclubs and shouting through the dead of the night, teeth chattering and boots clicking and fucking other people, spitting blood like spearmint toothpaste and downing shots of vodka. They’re sick and they’re sad, they’re black and they’re blue and ‘ _in sickness_ ’ and ‘ _in health_ ’ and ‘ _till death do us part_.’)

“I found him on the bathroom floor,” Ally is saying. “He was chokin’ and—Fuck, I don’t even know how to tell ‘ya. I didn’t know it would happen, I swear to god. What’s wrong with him? What’s he got wrong with him?”

Spasms and clenched teeth.

Bleeding tongues and smacking lips.

“You shouldn’t have let him touch that stuff, Ally,” Louis tells her. “You shouldn’t have let him, he’s out of his mind and he—”

“Louis,” Phil manages, and Louis stops talking. He’s dizzy on his feet. “Louis, my mom came to see me.”

A lover without his lover and a madman without his art. Van Gogh without his paint and Shakespeare without his quill and _who the fuck are you to say what should and shouldn’t be?_

Louis stares back at him with furrowed brows. “What? What do you mean?”

Phil wishes he’d never picked up the pen.

He’s still staring through the glass at Dan and there’s still no ring on his finger like there’s still no life to his limbs and if everything burns the same then maybe those safety flames in chemistry class were nothing more than a false alarm, maybe the acids were the alkalis and the sugars were the salts. Space pyjamas are just grey shirts and good people are just bad, London is just Paris and Phil is just Dan because we are what we create and everything is but a product of whatever it is not.

“What do you mean, Phil?” Louis repeats, and he’s at the man’s side with a hand on his shoulder and it’s the Louis he hates but hopes never leaves. “What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

“My mom, Lou,” he gets out from the back of his throat. “It’s my mom. Everything is my fault.”

“What about your mom?”

“She hates me,” Phil chokes and puts his face against the window, watching as the glass steams up before his exhale. “She hates me and _he_ hates me, look what I’ve done to him. Look at him, Louis, look what I did to my boy. He loved me so much and I—”

“No, Phil,” Louis interrupts. “No, you can’t take all the blame for this. Tell me about your mom, tell me what—”

“We didn’t see the end of the play, Louis.”

It’s then that Phil’s voice cracks and he pushes his face into his hands, whimpering that he’s sorry and that he never meant any harm. He thinks about the women in the florist’s and thinks about visiting Paris at five, thinks about Ella and morning sickness and his mother with tired eyes and _you were such a nightmare baby, Phil, I never knew what to do with you._ There’s blood all over his hands and the audience is laughing but this isn’t a fucking comedy, Phil thinks, this won’t be a fucking comedy.

There won’t be a happy ending.

There won’t be a perfect script.

“Take him to the cafeteria, go get him a drink or somethin’ and bring a couple back,” Ally’s voice is quiet in Phil’s ears over the sound of a jeering crowd, and she’s dropping loose change and a note or two into Hélène’s palms.

“Look what I did to him,” Phil whimpers at his husband behind the window. “Look what I did to him, look what I fucking _did_ —”

“Stop now, love,” Hélène says, and wraps an arm around Phil’s body. For a moment, he thrashes like it’s all he knows how to do, but then he’s thinking about the melon-orange sky again and Dan’s head on his lap and the world doesn’t seem as terrifying as it so often does.

The toddler with the stuffed elephant.

The water that burns his skin.

The theatre and the stage and Rosalind in the spotlight and _by my faith, you have great reason to be sad._

Phil is sobbing when he walks with Hélène back down the corridor.

We are what we create and what we create will never be good enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So far, this is all still very exciting to me and I’m really enjoying writing it. I hope you’re enjoying it, too. I’ll try and keep a regular update schedule, but with my current mental state and the pressure of school that may prove difficult. Anyway, what changes have you seen in Phil from the previous book so far?


	3. Nicotine

**number three: nicotine**

_The_ hospital’s cafeteria is empty and cold. As they wander through the doors, Hélène guides a still-crying Phil to a table and two plastic chairs. There’s a torn packet of sugar on its surface, white granules scattered aimlessly around a lukewarm cup of coffee and the sunlight tumbles down into the liquid from the surrounding windows. It’s a little like a dying rosebush, the scene, petals crumbling like autumn leaves under heavy heels and it’s too early to stomach the scent of detergent in the air.

“You can sit here while I go and get us the drinks, okay?” Hélène says, and gestures to one of the chairs. “I’ll get us a coffee each and bring some tissues over so you can wipe your eyes.”

“No,” Phil says. His voice is knotted at the end like the rope of an anchor. “I don’t want to sit here, Hélène, I don’t wanna.”

She takes her jacket off and drapes it over the back of the chair and Phil thinks about the one she gave to Dan and thinks about its whereabouts as she manages, “Okay, love. You can come with me,” and returns her hand to the small of his back. It feels a lot like security and a lot like consolation, a lot like sixteen-year-old Phil expressing himself through the art of written language in a second-hand notebook. It feels like Dan’s fingers through the black of his hair when he let it grow out too long, like watching him jump up onto the countertop and dangle his feet because they still didn’t touch the floor and—

Phil knows he shouldn’t think about these things.

He knows it only ever makes shit worse.

But somehow it’s all he _can_ think about—somehow it’s all he let’s himself—and his stomach is turning at the reminder of that Christmas Eve, of alcohol poisoning and blue lights and stretchers when he’d drank too much and said too much and couldn’t stand up for all it was worth. Dan had found him outside on the driveway in the frost, foetal position and covered in his own vomit and they’ve been to hell and back and returned a dozen times but Phil has never seen him so fucking distraught.

Tears like salted vodka.

Sweat that reeks of the same.

The woman behind the cafeteria’s counter is fixing up a sandwich when Hélène stops before her, bread and chicken and lettuce beneath her blue-plastic gloves. Light behind her shoulders, she peers up and beams, brushing her blonde hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand and greeting, “Bonjour!”

She’s giddy on her feet and the radiance is nauseating, and Phil reads ‘ _Sofia_ ’ from the name-tag pinned to her apron.

“English,” he remarks from behind Hélène, digging it up and spitting it out from the back of his throat. He fists his grey shirt and wipes it over his face.

“It’s alright, love, I can speak French,” Hélène tells him, but the woman has already begun nodding her head. 

“Oui, Anglais!” she says, and tugs the gloves from her hands. “What can I do for you this morning?”

There’s a sudden pounding in Phil’s temples as he brings his hands down over his face. The lights are too bright but his feet are too cold and Dan is there when he rubs his knuckles into his eyelids, there coughing and choking on his saliva. There’s strings of the stuff tumbling like cobwebs out of his mouth, hanging from between his teeth where it’s caught as though mozzarella, strawberry laces and lumps of toffee from a shop along the cold Welsh coastline.

(And ketamine and purpled fists and _I found him on the bathroom floor_ and—)

Shakespeare was always Phil’s favourite. Even as a child—bounding down the stairs with train-sets and building-blocks and soft toys stuffed in his school bag because _none of them will talk to me, mama, none of them will say a thing_ —he spent time reading through the plays, his mother translating the complexity into terms he could understand. Paper pages, yellowing textures, little fingers and flitting eyes and his bookshelf was littered with hardback copies of classics and sonnets that he could recite, to some extent, word for word.

“‘ _Love’s fire heats water_ ,’” Phil is standing in the kitchen with his mother (just a moment, back of his mind, eight or maybe younger) and there’s a book in his tiny hands, his shoulders back and eyes at the final line of the one-hundred-and-fifty-fourth sonnet. “‘ _Water cools not love_.’”

His mother turns to him from the stove. She has her hair tucked away behind her ears and a bolognese sauce splattered on the wooden spoon in her hand. “And which one was that, dear?”

“One hundred and fifty four,” Phil says, struggling to keep the book under his arm. “It’s not the best, you know, but it’s good.”

“Not the best?”

“No,” Phil pauses. “I like number eighteen best.”

But she never asked him why.

Nobody ever asks him why.

And that’s the kind-of thing, he thinks, that hurts in the way cyanide burns, that kills with a moving magma and a miserable duration because the flames slither along and swallow up his insides, his stomach and his kidneys and his liver already shrivelled like an old leather couch. They feed on the gasoline ( _look what I did to him, look what I did to my boy_ ) and consume him until he’s ash, burnt out and screaming that he meant it and deserved it because _he_ struck the match and _he_ let it crumble and _he_ thought he was able to fight fire with fire.

Outside the school gates and flicking at a lighter.

Inside Dan’s chest and splashing puddles of petrol.

They don’t ask because they don’t want to know, and Phil thinks maybe that reasoning explains more than it should. People don’t reach for the light switch when it’s easier to stay in the dark because the candle’s flame is no more than knowledge and no more than the expectation to do something with it, to aid and to help and to give enough of a shit that being alone doesn’t result in bruises and scars, in torn skin and broken nails and flesh that may as well be an ashtray. And Phil’s thinking about all the times he hurt himself in the name of not being worth it, of punishment and pleasure and _you promised me no more, Phil, you fucking promised me no more_ as his husband rots away in the city of love. 

Blue lights and stretchers.

An apology nobody understands.

Phil knows he shouldn’t think about these things, but he can’t stop thinking about them anyway.

“Yeah, a friend of mine,” Hélène is talking to the woman behind the counter, when Phil finally returns to the quiet cafeteria and the fresh sandwiches before him. “I’m sure he’ll be alright, it’s just—Well, it’s not looking too good at the moment. We’re waiting on the doctor and stuff.”

“It will be okay, I know it is going to be,” The woman—Sofia—glances up at Phil from the whirling coffee machine and says, “Your friend will smile again.”

It’s poignant in a way he hasn’t heard since his writing days.

Hélène manages, “Thank you,” and a step closer to Phil, seemingly in an attempt to console what she seems to know is bubbling inside of him. And she probably knows more than he does, he thinks, about existence and self-worth and why man is prone to addiction like he is a cough and a cold.

“My Dan doesn’t smile,” Phil says. “He doesn’t smile, Sofia, and he likes it that way.”

“He—” Sofia falters. “This boy, he is unhappy?”

“Unhappy,” Phil echoes. Ambulances dispatched on a treacherous Christmas Eve. “He found me in the cold.”

Hélène squeezes his shoulder. “Phil, love—”

“Le froid?” Sofia remarks, and then gives a slight shake of her head. “Monsieur, what happened to you?”

He’s shivering in his shirt and the grey is whiter than it’s ever been. He can hear Dan talking about aliens somewhere, talking about easels and the yellow streets of Arles and he can see him at eighteen and twenty and thirty, anything but the hospital and the bed and the now. Sometimes it’s easier to admit you need help in the hours after it’s too fucking late, Phil knows, when the bedsheets are pristine and waiting to be changed and the flowers artificial and the cards sympathetic. Sometimes it’s more (because they _always_ fucking need more) than bleeding faces and space pyjamas and a novel that communicates the long for things to change, for life doesn’t work out how we worked out it would and the conclusion is often never what we concluded it would be.

“I don’t know,” Phil tells the woman. “I don’t know what happened. My Dan is in hospital and we’re still in fucking Paris and I don’t know what happened.”

Sofia has placed two porcelain mugs on a tray atop of the counter. She’s frowning at the comment as Hélène fumbles to pay with the money Ally gave her, dropping it on the surface and muttering a dismissive, “Merci beaucoup,” before lifting the tray and heading back towards the table.

Phil is thinking about Shakespeare and maternity wards as he stares at the menu written on the large blackboard behind Sofia’s head, a hand on her hip and another at her side and it must have been days days since Dan last ate.

“Phil,” Hélène calls for him. “What is it? Are you hungry?”

“Dan has to eat, Hélène,” Phil tells her, and turns on his heels. “He has to eat, he hasn’t eaten—Let’s get him something, please can we get—”

“They’ll be feeding him, Phil, it’s alright. The nurses will be taking good care of him,” Hélène says, and returns to the counter. She puts the tray down and retrieves some more coins, passing them to Sofia and ordering a chicken-salad sandwich in a voice thickly accented and delicately woven. The smell of bleach is still strong in Phil’s nose but it’s diminished significantly since the thoughts of fire and brimstone, since the recollection of the days he spent lighting cigarettes on the wall outside of the school building in attempt to avoid returning home.

Crumbling walls and broken bones.

Phil’s mother with a discoloured face and busted lip.

Hélène looks an awful lot, he thinks, like she did in the old photographs she’d dig out from albums, Phil on her right knee and his brother on the other. She’d be there as a baby with rubber ducks in the sink and a towel wrapped tight around her head, and there as a teenager in a swimsuit on an English seaside. Riding shotgun in the family’s rental car, eating hamburgers in a fast-food restaurant and posing at a friend’s birthday party with her tongue out and her hair a dark mess of well-kept curls and—

“Sometimes you make me think of my mom, Hélène,” Phil admits it when they finally return to their seats, with a softness not articulated so properly in years. There’s a tray between them and she stills her hands around a mug.

“Your mom?”

“Yeah,” he says. His chest is heavy like his limbs used to be when he’d climb out of the local pool after swimming lessons. “You remind me of that light, you know, and I don’t understand it and I don’t even want to because I’m tired of wanting to understand everything. But you remind me of it, of the beautiful and the kind and the sunsets and the happy days and the people who used to love me before I gave them reason not to. And it’s special, Hélène, it makes everything so special. You should know that.”

There’s a sandwich and a coffee on a wobbling table before Phil, and it’s the most coherent he’s sounded for such a long time that he takes himself by surprise. 

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Hélène whispers, with a smile and a breath so heavy that it trembles. “But it’s a nice thought. What was your mother like, love?”

Phil pulls at the crust of his sandwich, and puts a small piece in his mouth. “She was gentle, my mom. She always knew what to say to make me feel better and—and I loved her very much.”

Polaroids in plastic film and pictures from her wedding day, pictures from her first birthday party and pictures from her last.

Hélène blows into the coffee and takes a sip. It’s milky and the porcelain clinks. “When did you last see her? It’s been a long time?”

“I don’t know,” Phil mumbles, more vulnerable than he’d ever allow himself to recognise. “I don’t remember, Hélène, I—I can’t think about that. She’s dead now.”

“She is?” Opposite him, the girl suddenly softens around the edges and her tone becomes the epitome of a tender tread. “I’m—Phil, I’m so sorry. What happened?”

Burning eyes.

Creaking floors.

A bottle of pills with a little orange cap.

“She didn’t mean to, Hélène,” he utters, gets out from behind a tight jaw. “It was an accident, she didn’t mean to. I was writing and—and everything was a mess and I left and she took too many. She didn’t mean to. I know she didn’t mean to.”

Phil doesn’t know this.

Phil could never really know this.

And it’s more than likely it wasn’t an accident, more than likely all she wanted to do was leave but it’s been twenty years since he first spat, “Accidental overdose,” and he’s damned if he ever so much as considers otherwise. The smell of tobacco, the taste of cold liquor, the woman who raised him slumped over on the bathroom floor and—

It doesn’t matter either way, they say.

What does it matter if she meant to do it?

Phil can never manage to grit his teeth hard enough to explain.

“Phil,” Hélène whispers. She’s staring at him as he continues to tear chunks from the sandwich. “That’s so awful, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. Did—”

“Do you know Shakespeare, Hélène?”

The greatest writer in the English language.

They say he probably didn’t exist.

(But Phil’s first love was the mind of the man from the medieval town of Stratford, the quills and the ink spots and the beats and the ballads. Couplets and calligraphy and the art of storytelling and there’s no fucking way he’d ever admit to the fact he knows most of the tale is bullshit.) 

“Shakespeare?” Hélène echoes. She has her fingers hooked around the handle of the mug. “Yeah, love, I know him. He’s your favourite, isn’t he?”

Nobody could ever understand how much he adores the old man’s words, he thinks, so he’s given up trying to communicate that, just how he’s given up writing. But there are some things that never really heal, some wounds that time cannot ever scab over and language and passion have bled and have scarred because he’s as much a part of them as they are of him. Writing is the tickle of cigarette smoke in the back of his throat, the smell of toxicity and stale fucking fog that pollutes the pretty cities and corrupts the untouched lungs and it won’t leave him alone, won’t admit it’s taken enough of him to last it a lifetime or two.

“‘ _The little love-God lying once asleep_ ,’” Phil returns to the kitchen in the autumn (eight or maybe younger) and he’s sitting on the floor now, his mother dishing up the dinner for that evening. “What does it mean, mama?”

The woman in the floral apron gazes down, eyes shifting from the saucepan of spaghetti. “What does what mean, sweetheart?”

“‘ _The little love-God_.’”

It‘s quiet in that moment, walls beige and tiles warm beneath Phil’s bare feet. For an autumn, the weather is timid and, in a sense, cowardly but things seem to be making more sense—(somehow, it’s all just coming together)—and Phil and his mother have settled comfortably into the possibility that life isn’t going to be so rough anymore.

“It’s a complicated thing,” she says to him. “Shakespeare was a clever man, darling, and he knew what he was talking about. I don’t think it’s the right time for you to be asking those questions yet.”

Phil’s eyes catch the passing of light as he frowns up at her. “Why not?”

“You’re much too little, love,” she tells him, and the smile that compliments it is drawn with a softer pencil. “But one day, I promise, one day you’ll understand. One day you’ll love someone so much that words won’t even scrape the surface, but some will come close.”

“I love people now, mama,” Phil argues, weaker. “I love you and I love Dad. And I love Martyn and I love the friends I made on holiday and—”

“It all gets a bit different when you grow up, is all. I loved those sonnets at your age just as much as you do,” she says, returning the saucepan to the stove. “But I struggle to get through them these days because they’re not the same as they used to be. Reading, darling, it’s a reflection. You’ll find yourself in there if you look hard enough.”

She’s petite beneath the window’s glow as Phil manages, “Did you find yourself in there, too?”

Too young to find the words.

Too young to tell the truth.

Too young to understand.

“I did,” she says, much slower and much quieter. “I just didn’t like what I found.”

And Phil is thinking about all the times they told him they knew what he was talking about, told him his work was the only antidote to the shit that made them sick. He’s thinking about the signings and the street-stops and the _thank you_ ’s, the bills they paid and the drinks they bought and _nobody understands me like you do, you saved my life and I owe you_ but they don’t owe him shit.

And he doesn’t owe them shit because he put the pen down and he left them with nothing.

But he knows it doesn’t fucking matter.

We’re all left with nothing in the end anyway.

“Phil, it’s okay—Come on, love, can you just try and take deep breaths?”

It’s Hélène and she’s talking and he’s shaking on the plastic chair.

Always shaking and always crying and always yelling for more, always spitting and always cussing and—

“It’s my fault, Hélène,” Phil’s voice is hoarse and throat is tight and he wants to see his mother in the days before she met him, in the days before he hurt her and the days before she became what she’d never wanted to be. He wants Dan on Christmas Eve and another fucking apology, wants time to take it back and time to make it worth it because people forget until they can’t anymore and everything just gets too much. He wants the naivety of a child, the perks of being oblivious, the timeouts and the Sundays he spent praying in the Methodist Church. “Nobody deserved what I did to them, I swear it, nobody deserved it but they got it anyway and—Hélène, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

Hélène doesn’t know what to do.

She’s crouching on the floor beside him and holding his knees but it’s written all over her face like the strongest argument in an essay that she doesn’t know what to do and she’s wishing she never got involved.

Everyone is _always_ wishing they never got involved.

“You haven’t done anything to me, Phil,” There’s a truth to Hélène’s eyes. “You haven’t got anything to be sorry for, okay? Not now, not ever.”

“I—” Phil thinks maybe he’s choking. He thinks maybe he doesn’t care. “I don’t wanna stay here no more, Hélène. I hate hospitals, I hate them—I hate this coffee and I hate this food and I hate this _smell_.”

He stands up and he says, “I’m going, I have to go,” but Hélène takes his wrist before he can walk away.

“Let me grab Louis and Ally a coffee each, and then we can go back upstairs,” she says. “Maybe we can go somewhere, alright? Maybe we can go somewhere.”

Too young to find the words.

Too young to tell the truth.

Too young to understand.

She sounds more like his mother than she’s fucking allowed to and Phil fucking hates the feeling that burns in his chest. Arsenic and gasoline and kerosene and flames, matchsticks and sparklers and lightbulbs and candles.

_Love’s fire heats water._

(He knows he shouldn’t think about these things.)

_Water cools not love._

: :

Louis and Ally are sitting in the corridor when they return, but Dan is still motionless in the hospital bed and that’s all Phil really cares about. He can’t stop crying for all it’s fucking worth and the hem of his shirt is soaked through and all he wants is to want nothing because it’s the only thing goddamn attainable. People are cold and people are empty, he thinks, and the beginning is only ever the beginning of the end because the jaws of disappointment chew and spit out the hopeful like ‘ _we have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise_.’

“Thank you,” Louis mutters, when Hélène hands him a cup. He glances between her and Phil. “A doctor stopped by, said he was lucky and stuff. We should leave when he wakes up, I don’t want to stay here any longer than necessary.” 

Hélène’s nod is slight. “That’ll be soon?”

“Apparently.”

“I’m sorry,” Ally blurts at Phil, as though a puppet with its strings pulled too tight. Her eyes are red and watery and she’s trying to catch her breath. “I never meant for this to happen, you have to believe me. I thought we were just having fun, I—God, I was only trying to cheer him up. He was so sad.”

Phil tries to say something, but can only muster a whimper.

“He knows you didn’t want this to happen, Ally,” Hélène speaks for him. “Like I do, and like Louis does. It was a mistake and it hurt him, but you had no idea the kind-of state he was in.”

Louis rubs a hand over his face. “We shouldn’t have let him leave. I shouldn’t have, it was my fault.”

“Louis,” Hélène sighs. “He’s not your responsibility. He’s not a baby and you don’t owe him anything.”

(The signings and the street-stops and the _thank you_ ’s.)

“He’s sick and he can’t take of himself and I knew that, but I still let him go.”

“Stop,” Phil chokes. He’s wiping his arm over his eyes and suppressing a sob. “Stop, Louis, s-stop it. It has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with you. All me and my hands and my drink and my words.”

Hospital wards.

Seeping veins.

Opiates and sleeping pills and _just one more hit, baby, one more hit._

“Phil—”

“He smoked with me, Lou,” Phil is crying as hard as he used to before they left for Paris, as hard as when his mother died and he was so far away. “He smoked w-with me and drank with me and I loved him so much and I should have—I should h-have given him the world, Lou, I loved him so much—”

He doesn’t care for what they have to say to him.

He’s sick of the same fucking stories and so fucking tired.

So he leaves for the room and finds Dan in its centre, the machine beeping on cue and pyjama bottoms riding up his legs. And the image shouldn’t be something Phil’s thinking he has to fight, but it’s bringing the sandwich back up his throat (dragging it with its fingernails) and he can’t swallow it down. It knocks him so sick that he stalls in the doorway for a moment and stares at the white wall above the bed until his sight begins to blotch and his pupils to dilate and partners and pastors and _the little love-God lying once asleep._

The leaves were orange on their wedding day and Dan didn’t weigh so little. But his collarbones are prevalent even from where Phil is standing now and he hates it, he fucking hates it, the bones and the pale flesh.

He drags a chair up to Dan’s bedside and sits on the edge of it, resting his elbows on the mattress and touching his husband’s cold hand. His chest moves slightly—( _up and down and up and down_ )—and his lips remain parted, dry and cracked and Phil can’t stop crying because he isn’t the man he fell in love with but he’s fucking in love with him anyway.

“My mom came to see me, Dan,” he chokes, and grips onto his cold fingers. “S-She came to see me and I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want her to, Dan, I—Please, I want to go home.”

Phil knows he shouldn’t think about these things.

He knows it only ever makes shit worse.

But self-destruction is an addiction and he can’t fucking shake it, can’t pull the faulty wire from under his fucking skin. He’s sick and he’s sweating and he’s longing for a taste, a drop of some syrup or liquor or booze. And he’s thinking about his adolescence when he spat cruel words at his mother, telling her she was selfish and a pill-head and a junkie and telling her she couldn’t possibly love him in the way she preached she did. Because mothers don’t pop prescription pills under their children’s noses and mothers don’t abuse medication they were given in fucking confidence but Phil has seen enough of the world to know now that praying cannot cure what doctors who play God can.

Something to tire us over.

Something to wish it away.

Vicodin and fentanyl and _she took too many but she didn’t mean to, I know she didn’t mean to._

(Accidental overdose, accidental overdose, accidental overdose.)

“I know I-I hurt you,” Phil sobs. He clings onto Dan’s pyjama shirt. “I know I did, I know it. I don’t w-want you to be sad no more and I don’t want to stay here.”

Golden rings in dirty puddles and freezing hearts in too-warm chests and _I don’t believe in soulmates but, if I did, you’d be mine._

They buy into clichés.

They buy into happy endings.

Phil is his mother and Phil is his father and Phil is his husband, but Phil is William Shakespeare and Vincent Van Gogh too because we are what we touch and what we touch touches us, like ‘ _sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything_.’

We have to keep up and we have to stay down.

We have to keep dumb and we have to stay blind.

Drink and smoke and snort and shoot. 

“I’m sorry,” Phil whimpers, and trembles against Dan’s shoulder. “M’really sorry. So sorry. I miss you so much.”

He doesn’t think he’d say much different to his mother.

And he doesn’t think he’d say much different to himself.

He continues to cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note that chapters will get longer as the story progresses, in the same way they did with the previous. I don’t know I how feel about this, but I hope you enjoyed it nevertheless.


	4. Ventricle

**number four: ventricle**

_Phil_ is there when Dan wakes up. Half-asleep and half-unfeeling, he’s slouched in the little chair with Louis’ jacket over his shoulders and his eyes red and inflamed. He’s looking an awful lot like he did in the peak of his addiction, in the days before his husband drove him down to the city’s treatment centre after he tried clawing his eyes out and the doctor informed him _it’s that or a hospital, and the good Lord knows you don’t want that._

The good Lord, Phil thought and still fucking thinks, does not know anything.

“He’s afraid of hospitals,” Dan had told the man in the white coat. It was the emergency department again, the ward with the blue curtains and the crisis teams. Everyone cramped together, cardboard sick-bowls and no beds available. “He wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t called the ambulance and the paramedics forced him in.”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve come here seeking a similar treatment, Phil,” The doctor said. “The previous was alcohol, correct me if I’m wrong?”

Dan’s nod was slight. “Last Christmas, it—Well, it was alcohol poisoning. He’d been mixing drinks.”

“Yes, well,” The man paused to clear his throat, voice croaky and gruff. He retrieved a brochure out of the pocket of his coat. “The centre I was referring to is one directly linked to our facility, for addicts dealing with varying degrees of the sickness. I’d suggest taking this option into serious consideration. I’m afraid that I can only advise you on what path to take, Phil, but I must stress that you’re fortunate enough to still be in a position in which you can make this decision. Many others aren’t as lucky.”

Phil took the brochure in his pale hands from the bed, and clutched at the ends.

“Rehab?” he choked. “You want me to go to _rehab_?”

His husband had said it so many times.

His brother had said it so many more.

“Rehabilitation is often necessary, Phil, and nothing to be ashamed of,” The doctor remarked. “And, like I said, after the note from your psychiatrist, it’s going to have to be the centre or—”

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Phil snapped. He hadn’t come down yet and he motherfucking knew it. “He doesn’t know, he doesn’t fucking know.”

“Or, what?” Dan urged, ignoring him. “What if he chooses not to go?”

The doctor straightened up. “A hospital. Despite your obvious differences, Phil, your psychiatrist is a trained professional and seems to think it would be beneficial for you to spend some time in a mental health unit.”

Dan turned to rub his hands over his face and inhale through his nose, before fixing the collar of the black jacket on his shoulders. “Like—Like for the clinically insane?”

“A fucking asylum,” Phil spat, and screwed the brochure up in his fist. “What the hell do you think I am, a fucking schizo? You think I’m a crazy person, think I go around foaming at the mouth and butchering myself? I’m not crazy, you asshole, I’ve never been crazy—Tell him I’m not, Dan, tell him.”

“I don’t—” Dan shook his head and slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “With all due respect, Doctor, I don’t necessarily think that would be best for Phil.”

“Nobody is saying you’re crazy, Phil,” The doctor told him. “Nobody is saying that at all. The stigma around these hospitals, it’s incorrect. It only makes for a good story. They offer nothing more than a safe environment to people who may be a danger to themselves, or to others. No surgery, no shocking, no lunatics wandering the halls. This isn’t eighteenth century England, Phil, this is modern psychiatry. Prescriptions and therapy. Understood?”

Rehab or asylum.

The good Lord knew Phil didn’t want either.

“Well, it ain’t like I’m gonna do anything with it,” Ally is saying from the other side of the room when Phil finally lifts his head up from a still Dan’s arm, and peers around. “Just take it, Louis, please. It’s the least I can fuckin’ do for the lot of ‘ya.”

He doesn’t know what they’re talking about and he doesn’t think he cares.

“Of course, you’re gonna use it,” Louis tells her. “Of course you are. We’re not robbing you of the money that’s paying for your food and the roof over your head.”

“My friend is paying the rent for a while, she ain’t gonna kick me out,” Ally says. “Come on, it’s three hundred euros. I don’t need it, not like you sorry sods do. Take it and use it for your trip.”

Phil rubs his face against his arm. It’s cold in the room and the lights are bright, and he’s wishing Dan would wake up more than he’s wishing for anything else. His nose is stuffy and his cheeks all blotched, the memory of his mother still lingering in his mind like the handful of dirt and he gathered and tossed onto her coffin.

_Take it and use it for your trip._

Eight hours of acid and breathing walls and crawling bugs.

Cockroaches on the floor and hanging loose out of Dan’s mouth and—

Bad trip, bad trip, bad trip.

“We’re leaving?” he says. “Where are we going? I don’t wanna stay here, Lou.”

“We’ll leave when he wakes up, love,” Hélène tells him. She’s sat on the opposite side of the bed and she’s tired and worn down and there’s an emptiness to her eyes Phil hasn’t seen for years, hasn’t seen since he first gazed into his own in that bathroom mirror after he walked out of the centre with a bag on his back and tears all over his cheeks and _a melancholy of mine own, a melancholy of mine own._

There won’t be a happy ending.

There won’t be a perfect script.

Phil used to write, he thinks, about happy endings and the like but the good Lord knows it was only wishful thinking. The good Lord knows that there’s no place for a junkie and a madman in a fairytale, knows that no matter how many times you crack his bones and mould his flesh and pull his strings like a puppet in a quaint little theatre, he’s never going to fit in the way he wishes he fucking would. He’s never going to make sense enough to be tossed upon the pages, to be crafted into a character that winds up being understood because there’s nothing to understand—there’s never been fucking anything to understand—about those who welcome hell with crucifixes around their throats.

Those who welcome the devil with gospels on their tongues.

“Please, Louis,” Ally urges, forcing the cash closer to the man. “Take it, I won’t ask you again.”

A nagging parent.

A nagging doctor.

People who think they know what’s fucking best.

“For fuck’s sake, Louis, just take the goddamn money,” Phil spits, and stands up from the chair to retrieve the wad from Ally’s hands. He forces her a slight smile and a, “Cheers,” before sitting back down and crossing his legs. 

“Phil,” Hélène says.

(Phil is thinking—all of a sudden—about the sunlight on Dan’s skin in the tender month of May, about June and his birthday and a trip away to the beach. He’s thinking about pebbles on the coastline and swimsuits and steak houses, about fingers against warm piano keys and children jumping over waves. He’s thinking about ‘ _in sickness_ ’ and thinking about ‘ _in health_ ’ and they’re sitting eating sticks of rock as the tide rolls in, their teeth sticky and lips wet and _I want to talk about Van Gogh, Phil, I want to talk about Doré_.)

Phil shakes his head as he stares at Dan’s still body. “It’s the least she can do.”

“Fucking hell,” Louis manages, somewhere stifled from the back of his throat. He moves to take the money from where it has been stashed under Phil’s arm. “What’s wrong with you? She’s trying to be kind.”

“She could have killed him.”

“Phil, it was an accident,” Ally retaliates, and sadness squeezes at the remorse in her tone like a teddy bear (damp with snot and tears) in a tight fist. “I promise ‘ya, it was an accident. I ain’t ever—God, I ain’t ever dealt with that shit before. I didn’t know what to do but I did my best, I’m tellin’ you.”

And Phil wants to fucking puke.

He wants to fucking puke because she sounds just like him, sounds just like he used to in the days sincerity was no more than a pathetic attempt he’d chew up and spit out and _I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to do it again._ He’s a cheat and he’s a liar and he’s still choking on the syllables of the words he could barely form, like sobriety and relapse and detox and truth and _I did my best, I’m tellin’ you_ but nobody fucking believes him. And like Shakespeare’s own, like King Macbeth, it’s only a matter of time before one lie snowballs into another and the world is at your feet but the good Lord knows success is expensive and its price-tag isn’t cheap. Sooner or later, Phil thinks, it’s more about the blood on your hands than it is about the blood on your sword, and he doesn’t give a fuck which is mightier when he reminds himself that his pen dried up long ago but his palms are soaking red.

_Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow._

“Do you have a favourite?” Dan was eighteen the first time he asked it, and the first time he realised the answer would change depending on the way Phil was feeling. “Play, I mean.”

They were sitting in a little café in London, and it was nothing and everything like the one they’d visited before the flight to Paris.

Phil glanced up from the marshmallows in his hot chocolate. “Shakespeare?”

“Doesn’t have to be,” Dan said. “But, knowing you, it will be.”

“Touché,” Phil remarked, and smiled. There was a copy of ‘ _Don Quixote_ ’ that Dan had bought from a bookstore before them, his seventh but his first of that particular design. One day, he’d said, he’d have them all. “I feel unoriginal saying it now but I guess, like, ‘ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.’ Or ‘ _Macbeth_ ’, actually. Yeah, probably ‘ _Macbeth_.’”

Dan sat folding the corners of a receipt. “Why’s that?”

He was mellow and appeared fragile to touch.

“Loads of reason,” Phil said. “The way it makes everyone feel, mostly. I used to do theatre, you know, and people backstage were scared of it. Wouldn’t even say the name.”

Dan frowned. “‘ _Macbeth_ ’? Really?”

“Hell, yeah. They think it’s cursed or some shit. You never heard that?”

“No,” he said. “But I’m not surprised. I read it a few times as a kid and I remember the feeling it gave me. Atmospheric. It’s not scary, as such, but it’s damn good writing. Everything ugly written into everything beautiful.”

Phil didn’t think he could have said it any better himself.

“Exactly,” he remarked. “It’s a fucking amazing play. The guilt and the lies and the images he paints as you watch them tumble into insanity are all so goddamn mesmerising. _Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow_.”

Dan grinned. “That shit _haunts_ me.”

Phil can still see him now.

“It would haunt the best of us, sunshine.”

“Can you hear me?” Louis is talking at Phil’s side when the clouds in his eyes pass and he finds himself back in the hospital again. “Dan, buddy, can you hear me? Try not to freak out, okay, it’s gonna be okay—”

“Don’t move too much, love,” Hélène says, from the opposite side of the bed. Her hands are on Dan’s knees and she’s touching his pyjamas as he whimpers and shuffles, eyelashes fluttering and lips smacking.

This isn’t what they fucking wanted.

This isn’t what either of them fucking wanted.

“I don’t—” Dan is choking on the shock and paranoia in the bed. He coughs it out and shakes on the flimsy mattress. “Hélène, I—Louis, please—”

“Shh, Dan,” Louis hushes him. “Calm down, buddy, everything is alright. You’re in hospital.”

Rehab or asylum.

_Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow._

“Hospital,” Dan manages, and Phil leans across and tugs at his sleeve. They’re talking about heaven somewhere, he knows, in some universe and in some time, way back in the old hotel room that no longer reeks of them. It reeks of all the shit they did instead, maybe, reeks of Phil’s fists punching purple into another man’s skin, blood under his nails and all over his knuckles and—

“Hey, Dan,” he whispers, edges sewn softly together. “Hey, there. You’re awake, sunshine, you’re awake and I’m here and—”

“No, no,” Dan whimpers, and brings his hands to his face. “No, Phil, please—Get off me, get off me—”

(.)

“You’re being so fucking dramatic,” Dan had spat that afternoon after the doctor with the brochure and the emergency ward’s curtains, as they travelled home down a little country road. “I’m not talking to you when you’re like this. Do you hear me? I’m not talking to you when you’re still fucking high.”

“I’m not going to a hospital,” Phil seethed. “Do you hear _me_? I’m not going.”

“You could have died,” The words scampered up from the back of Dan’s throat. “Do you realise that, Phil? You could have died, but you don’t fucking care. And I know you don’t fucking care, I know you don’t because you’re still here, you’re still sitting here in the same position with the same shit in your bloodstream and the same apology on your tongue. Even after last year, even after Christmas when I found you and—Why the fuck do you keep doing this to me?”

Phil pinched the bridge of his nose and reached across the small space of the car for Dan’s wrist.

“No,” he spat, and thrashed out of his grip. “Get off me, I’m not interested. You go to this fucking facility—rehab or asylum, I couldn’t care less—and you do the time you have to there to get clean, or we’re done. Do you understand? I’m done.”

Drugs and writers and syrup and lovers and you were always a shitty friend, Phil, you were always a shitty friend.

Seventeen with a ‘ _Macbeth_ ’ script in his hands, backstage and feet up and bottom lip tucked under his teeth.

“‘ _Wherefore was that cry_?’” he recites, voice bold and eyebrows furrowed.

“‘ _The queen, my lord_ —’” The timid newbie with the blond hair and the thick-framed glasses speaks from the couch opposite Phil, testing out the waters as the character of Seyton. “‘— _is dead_.’”

Phil stands and tucks a hand into his back pocket, the other clutching at the script print-out and his eyes flitting up and down from the soliloquy.

“‘ _She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word_ ,’” he utters, pacing the small distance of the room. He’s thinking about the times he recited these very lines to his mother as a child, thinking about the times he whispered them under his breath in the darkness of his bedroom with his mouth against the pillow and his chest moving raggedly in motions of quiet now, you know you shouldn’t say this. “‘ _Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death_.’”

Drugs and writers and syrup and lovers.

Dan in the early hours of weekday mornings.

Dan with a smile to light up the world.

“‘ _Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more_ —”

Dan with his fingers pumping oxygen into Phil’s chest.

Dan crying and stumbling in the snow.

“— _It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing_.”

“Come over here, Phil,” Louis says, reaching for Phil’s arms and pulling him to his feet from the hospital’s chair. He shifts him with his hands and attempts to force him across the room, but Phil is already fighting it and spitting, “Don’t touch me, Lou, I have to be with him,” before they reach the door.

He’s crying and wishing he was dead. 

“Later, okay? He needs to keep calm now, he’s just woken up,” Louis tells him, orange and orange and write me a poem to make me happy. “You and I can go look for some shit we need for our trip in the store, okay? We can go search for a store.”

“I’ll stay here with Dan,” Hélène says. “And see if I can find the doctor and ask him about leaving.”

“There’s a store a few blocks from this place, Louis,” Ally informs him. “Take a left when you leave ‘ere and keep followin’ the road. There’s a little store on the corner.”

Phil knows he shouldn’t have touched the man in the bed.

He knows he should never have fucking touched the eighteen-year-old he once was with the dirty hands he once had, mishandling and misguiding and breathing life into his lungs just to leave him for dead when he realised he’d taken what he wanted from the first person willing to give it. A little bit of love, he thinks, a little bit of _to me, you’re more than good enough_ and a little bit somebody to bide the time when the hours grew so long that he couldn’t tell them apart. Because all either of them ever really got from their piece-of-shit marriage was the reminder that we’re all innately sick of ourselves, and so fucking desperate for some kind-of feeling that we’ll take hell over heaven if it means maybe we’re more likely to burn.

Rehab or asylum.

Marriage or divorce.

_Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow._

Louis is quiet as he takes Phil out of the room, down the elevator and out through the ground floor exit. They pass the sign for the maternity ward on the way and Phil remarks, “My mama came to see me, Lou, and she was so sad,” as though it means nothing at all.

He’s wondering if it even does.

Wondering if anything matters to anyone in the end.

“She visited you at the hotel, right?” Louis says, and it’s softer than it’s allowed to be. The streets are busier than they had been that morning, heels clicking over pavers and voices chorusing a gentle hum. “What did she say?”

“That I’m just like him,” Phil manages, as though it’s the most difficult thing he’s ever said. As though it gets caught in the web of remorse at the back of his throat.

They cross a road with a group of teenagers (cigarette smoke and leather jackets) and Louis takes Phil’s hand, pulling him in what is the apparent right direction and questioning, “Just like, who?”

“My dad.”

(Cracking his knuckles and dragging the woman he married down the hallway like a fucking rag doll.)

“Your—” Louis stalls for a moment. He doesn’t seem to know what to say. “Do you want to tell me about him, Phil?”

Phil kicks his heels and jumps over a crack in the sidewalk. The city is flourishing and there’s a library to the right of him and he gestures towards it with an urgent, “Look, Lou, look—Can we go? Can you take me? It’s a library, I want to go to the library.”

The building is grand, flowers and bushes decorating its exterior and write me a poem to make me happy.

Dirty pages.

Bitten nails.

Battered novels and blank verse.

“We can stop by on the way back, if you really want to,” Louis says, and peers around. “I need to print off train tickets, or something. We should really leave this godforsaken city.”

“We’re leaving Paris?” Phil mutters. They’re standing still on the pavement. “Dan doesn’t—Dan loves it here. Dan loves Paris.”

“I know, Phil, I know he does. But he can’t—Well, we can’t stay here. Not after everything that’s happened. It’s safer if we leave, alright?”

Phil doesn’t think he cares about safety.

Phil doesn’t think he’s cared about safety since he decided to drink his life away and fly miles from his unborn child.

And then he’s standing on the street and he’s thinking about Ella, and how she looked on the dance floor with the dress around her thighs and the drink in her hand and music, club lights, shots and liquor. They were there with sweaty skin and there with shuffling feet and zippers of loose frocks and buckles of black jeans. No ring on Phil’s ringer and no feeling behind his eyes, his teeth grinding down the letters of ‘apathetic’ like a piece of stale tobacco or a lump of rotting gum and _full of sound and fury, signifying nothing._

Dan on the kitchen floor in space pyjamas and a crazed head and a dirty golden ring, stained with tattoo ink and a gash Phil made and left untreated to get infected and—

Endings will never make sense if beginnings don’t either.

_Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow._

“I know she wouldn’t be proud of me, Lou,” Phil says, as they continue to wander down the street. It’s too busy to be comfortable. ”I know she wouldn’t be and it’s my fault.”

“Your mother?” Louis asks, and Phil nods. “Well, I—You know, I think she would be. You wrote a book. You wrote a book and it was a success. You sold a million copies, yeah? You sold them. You did that.”

Dan trashing their bedroom and tearing pages out of his novel.

Dan accusing him of cheating and jeopardising his future.

The better writer and the commercial success.

Those two, Phil thinks, are rarely ever the same.

He shakes his head. “No, Lou. It’s not about that. She wouldn’t care about that. My mom wouldn’t. She’d tell me I drink too much, and she’d tell me the drugs were disappointing. I’d scare her, I know it. I’d scare her.”

“She—” It seems, for a moment, that Louis doesn’t quite know what to say. They’re following the road and he’s staring at his shoes. “Did she not like that stuff? Was she against it? I know everybody usually is, but—Was she especially against it?”

Suitcases and wine stains.

Cusses and carols.

A discoloured face and a busted lip and his mother cowering in the corner of the kitchen, crouched under the counter with clenched fists and wild eyes and _please don’t, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again._

Smashing glass.

Screaming and sobbing.

“Mama?” Phil is six years old and standing in the kitchen doorway, teddy bear in his hand and clad in blue pyjamas. His father is but a silhouette before him, moonlight pouring through the window across the stretch of his shoulders. In the garden, the swings of Phil’s little swing-set are blowing in the wind and his mother is whimpering quietly on the cold-filed floor.

His father turns with half a vase in his hand. The glass is sharp around the edges and he’s standing there seething, his bottom lip trembling and his eyes already saying that he took it too far and it motherfucking terrifies him.

“Phil,” he speaks, with a voice eerily steady after a mere brush of his eyelids. “What are you doing up, son? You have school tomorrow.”

Phil brings his teddy bear to his chest and cradles it.

“Why is mom crying? Why are you screaming at each other?” he whispers. “You—you woke me up.”

His father shakes his head with a slight smile, all ragged breath from his frantic chest. “Sorry, kiddo,” he says. “Your mother had an accident, that’s all. I’ll clean her up and she’ll be okay tomorrow, you just head on back to bed. Can you do that for me?”

His mother is still whimpering on the floor in a nightgown that cradles her thighs.

“I—” The words give way under the terror in Phil’s voice. He clings tighter onto his teddy bear and forces, “Can you tuck me in?”

His father clenches his jaw and takes a step forward, shoving the broken vase onto the countertop. There’s liquor lined up beside the spice-rack and Phil’s mother has her head against the cupboards, her hair pulled over her face in a matted mess soaked-through with red. It’s watery and it’s sticky, dripping onto the marble and all the way down her back and—

“No, Phil,” Phil’s father says. He’s clutching at the sides of the counter-top with bleach-white knuckles. “Just go to bed, just get back upstairs. I won’t tell you again.”

Kisses and bloodshed.

The devil went to heaven.

“Dad,” Phil whimpers. Big boys don’t cry, his grandfather told him. Big boys don’t cry but Phil doesn’t think he’s cut out for this as he stares at his mother sobbing against the cupboard. He doesn’t think he’s cut out for this kind of war, and doesn’t think his grandfather would be either. Because he’s seen the weapons and he’s seen the artillery, he’s seen the dead men and he’s seen the rubbled buildings but this is a helplessness the infantry wouldn’t understand. This is cruelty and this is trauma. This is a child and this is his mother. “Please, it’s—Mama’s bleeding, she’s bleeding—We have to clean her up, I—Please, I’m scared.”

_Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow._

“She took pills, too,” Phil chokes suddenly, bare arms cold on the busy Paris street. “She took them and they killed her, Louis. She’d tell me I was stupid for getting involved and she’d be fucking right.”

Louis is staring at him. He opens his mouth and shuts it, and then opens it again. “No, Phil—No, it’s not—That’s not your fault. You didn’t want things to end up like this.”

This isn’t what they fucking wanted.

This isn’t what either of them fucking wanted.

_Signifying nothing._

_Signifying nothing._

_Signifying nothing._

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Phil tells him. He can’t catch his breath. “I don’t want to. Where’s the store? Let’s just go to the fucking store.”

And so Louis takes him to the store.

And he doesn’t say a word.

And Phil knows he’s thinking the entire time about what to say, but he doesn’t fucking say anything and that’s probably for the best. The store is a small supermarket on the corner and, as they walk through the door, a woman leaves with her fingers wrapped around a little boy’s. He’s skipping and gazing up at her, his mouth forming words that Phil doesn’t understand but wishes he fucking could and—

Phil wanders down the aisles with Dan in the back of his mind.

Eighteen and twenty.

Grinning and crying.

“I always loved you the same,” he can hear himself saying. Fairy lights and wet kisses and liquor on his lover’s tongue. “Drunk and sober. Awake and sleeping. All your ugly bits, all your pretty bits. My best friend, baby, you’re my best friend. Always the same.”

( _Fuck you, fuck you, love you_.)

The words don’t fit into the happily ever after’s Phil’s mother first told him about, and he wonders if—really—her disappointment would amount from the fact that he sold a story he didn’t even enjoy. He sold a story he never would have bought himself, one of petty romance and stale fantasy with little-to-no original thought and, if the good Lord knows anything, he knows Phil’s husband deserved the deal he was too selfish to turn down himself. The books and the poems, the pages and the paintings and the art he spent studying through the long hours of the night, with black coffee and ink-stained fingertips and a dedication Phil had never fucking known. Because all he ever wanted to do was waste away drinking himself sick until it wasn’t about having fun, it was about getting by, and it was about not wanting to do it alone anymore. And so he reached for Dan’s wrists and he pulled him down to his level, and he held his head under the waves of the Great Ocean of Melancholy that teased—ever so subtly—with the whisper of the rolling tide: _it’s not that you can’t breathe, it’s that you’re choosing not to._

And then they were both drowning.

Or maybe they’ve only ever been sinking.

Louis is stacking bottles of red wine into the basket hanging on his arm when he remarks, “My mother took pills, too.”

And Phil rubs his eyes and says, “What?”

“My mother,” Louis says. The bottles are clinking together. “She took pills, like you said yours did. She took them and she died. I told you once, I told you she was sick.”

Phil doesn’t know if he remembers it.

Vincent Van Gogh.

Dirty space pyjamas.

(‘ _Café Terrace at Night_.’)

“Did—” Phil pauses to swallow back the bile in his throat as Louis continues walking onwards, basket knocking against his thigh. “Was it an accident?”

Louis turns. “Her death?”

Phil nods.

“No,” he says, and it’s calm and it’s collected. “It was suicide.”

A filthy word for a filthy thing.

Hell is for the weak, Phil’s father used to say, for the angels who fell because they weren’t strong enough.

And then Phil’s thinking about Lady Macbeth and thinking about blame, and thinking about rehab and the empty white walls and the beds and the needles and his friend with a broken—

_Stop, stop, stop._

“I’m sorry,” Phil manages, despite the crumble of his voice around the edges. “I’m so sorry, Lou.”

“Not your fault,” Louis says. He shakes his head and wanders to wrap an arm around Phil’s shoulders. “But, I appreciate it. I’m sorry, too. For your mother.”

Phil shakes his head and stares at the bottles of wine in the basket. Lady Macbeth and the stench of remorse and _here’s the smell of blood still._

“My mom, it—” Phil shuts his eyes and begins again. “What happened, it never leaves. It won’t ever leave. I don’t know how it is for you, Lou, I don’t but that’s what it’s like for me. Like a punishment, or a curse. Like, whatever I do, I won’t be able to escape it. She left and she got away and I’m—I’m still here, Lou, I’m still stuck here. Praying to a God I don’t believe in that she ends up in a heaven I don’t believe in either. Drunk and sober. Awake and sleeping. It’s not fucking fair.”

“Sometimes I think you and I are more alike than either of us would like to admit,” Louis says, and manages the slightest of smiles. “I know how it is. It’s not fair, but it never has been. Hell on earth.”

Phil shivers in his grey shirt.

Rehab or asylum.

Marriage or divorce.

_Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise for the late (ish) update! I am currently sick and finally managed to get this chapter finished. How did you find it? What were your favourite parts? I think, for one, it was very relevant to Phil’s story. Thanks for reading!


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